<nettime> Bruno Latour: The health crisis is leading us to prepare for climate

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(Almost) auto-translated from:

https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/04/01/la-crisi-sanitaria-ci-induce-a-prepararci-al-cambiamento-climatico/

The health crisis is leading us to prepare for climate change
by Bruno Latour

The unexpected coincidence between general isolation and the period of
Lent is at least welcome for those who, being in the rear, have been
asked, in solidarity, to do nothing. This forced fasting, this secular
and republican Ramadan can be an excellent opportunity for them to
reflect on what is important and what is negligible ...

As if the intervention of the virus could serve as a general test
for the next crisis, the one in which the reorientation of living
conditions will apply to everyone and for every aspect of daily
existence that we will have to learn to consider carefully. I advance
the hypothesis, like many others, that the health crisis prepares us,
induces us, encourages us to prepare for climate change. However, this
hypothesis remains to be verified.

The virus is nothing more than a link in a chain

To authorize the interconnection of the two crises is the sudden and
painful realization that the classic definition of society - humans
among them - makes no sense. The state of society depends, at all
times, on the associations between many actors, most of which do not
have a human form. This applies to microbes - we have known this since
Pasteur's time -, but also to the Internet, for the law, for the
organization of hospitals, for the capacities of the state as well as
for the climate.

And of course, despite the bickering around a "state of war" against
the virus, this is nothing more than a link in a chain in which
the management of mask stocks or tests, the regulation of property
rights, civic behavior , gestures of solidarity, have the same weight
in defining the degree of virulence of the infectious agent. Once
the entire network of which the virus is only a link is taken into
account, it does not act in the same way in Taiwan, Singapore, New
York or Paris. The pandemic is not even a "natural" phenomenon like
the famines of the past or the current climate crisis. For some time
now, society has no longer been confined to the narrow confines of the
social sphere.

__The extension of powers and the sirens of ambulances

That said, it is not clear to me how we can go much further than the
parallel. Because, after all, health crises are not new, and the rapid
and radical intervention of the state does not seem to be particularly
innovative so far. It is enough to see President Macron's enthusiasm
for taking on the figure of head of state that he has so far lacked
in such a flagrant way. Much more than the attacks - which basically
boil down to a police matter -, pandemics awaken, among the rulers
as well as among the governed, a sort of evidence - "we must protect
you", "you must protect us" - which strengthens the state authority
and allows him to claim what, in any other circumstances, would be
welcomed with a revolt.

But this state is not the state of the 21st century and of ecological
change, it is that of the nineteenth century and the so-called
"biopower". To express ourselves in the words of the late Alain
Desrosières, it is really the state of statistics: management of the
population on a territorial network seen from above and guided by the
power of experts. Exactly what we see rising today - with the only
difference being that it is replicated step by step, until it becomes
planetary.

It seems to me that the originality of the current situation is
that, remaining locked in the house, while outside there is nothing
left but the extension of the police powers and the sirens of the
ambulances, we collectively recite a caricatured form of the figure
of the biopower that seems to have come directly from a course of the
philosopher Michel Foucault. There is also the forgetfulness of the
many invisible workers forced to work anyway, so that the others can
continue to hide in their home - without forgetting the migrants who
cannot be accommodated. But precisely, this caricature is that of an
era that is no longer ours.

__An immense abyss

There is an immense gulf between the state capable of saying "I
protect you from life and death", that is, from the infection of a
virus whose trace is known only to scientists and whose effects are
understandable only through the collection of statistical data, and
the state that would dare to say "I protect you from life and death,
because I maintain the conditions of habitability of all living beings
on which you depend."

Just think about it: imagine that President Macron comes to announce,
in the same Churchillian tone, a package of measures to leave the
reserves of gas and oil in the soil, to stop the marketing of
pesticides, to abolish deep plowing and, supreme audacity, to prohibit
the heating of smokers on the terraces of bars ... If the petrol tax
triggered the movement of the gilets jaunes, it makes one shudder at
the thought of the riots that would set the country on fire. And yet,
the request to protect the French, for their own good, from death is
infinitely more justified in the case of the ecological crisis than in
that of the health crisis, since it is literally everyone, and not a
few thousand people - and not for a period, but forever.

The pathogen whose terrible virulence is changing the living
conditions of each of us is not the virus at all, but nothing but
humans!

__Exit from globalized production

We understand that this state does not exist. And what is more
worrying is that we do not see how it would prepare to go from one
crisis to another. In the health crisis, the administration has a very
classic pedagogical role, and its authority coincides perfectly with
the old national borders - the archaism of the return to the European
borders is the painful proof of this.

For ecological change, the relationship is reversed: it is the
administration that must learn from a multifaceted people, on multiple
scales, what existence in territories entirely redefined by the
need to get out of current globalized production can look like. The
administration would be completely unable to dictate measures from
above. In the health crisis, it is in fact good people who have to
learn again, like in elementary school, to wash their hands and cough
on the elbow. In ecological change, it is the state that is in a
learning situation.

But there is another reason that the figure of the "war against the
virus" makes incomprehensible: in the health crisis, it may be true
that humans as a whole "fight" viruses - even if they have no interest
in our comparisons and go their way from throat to nose, killing us
without remorse.

The situation is tragically reversed in the ecological mutation: this
time, the pathogen whose terrible virulence has changed the living
conditions of all the inhabitants of the planet, is not the virus at
all but the humans! And not all humans, but some, who make war on us
without declaring it.

For this war, the nation state is poorly prepared, poorly calibrated,
poorly designed, because the fronts are multiple and cross each one of
us. It is in this sense that the "general mobilization" against the
virus does not in any way show that we will be ready for the next one.
It is not only the military who is always left behind in a war.

But in the end, you never know, a period of Lent, even if secular and
republican, can lead to spectacular conversions. For the first time
in years, millions of people, stuck in the house, find this forgotten
luxury: the time to reflect and discern what usually makes them shake
unnecessarily in every direction. We respect this long and unexpected
fast.

This article was published in "Le Monde" on March 25, 2020




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